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We've seen promises from "by the year 2000", 2003, floating hotels by 2007, and so on. Now we have the first cargo ship by a private company ACTUALLY dock with the ISS, hooray! SpaceshipTwo with Virgin Galactic is finally doing test flights.

However, I can't find any info on their webpages or press releases - a couple of times they've said "in the next two years".

What's the earliest PUBLISHED date any current companies have set for a launch for a tourist flight (excluding NASA or Russian flights)?

edit

As I said, excluding NASA or Russian flights, and really mean 'mass' tourism - available to those who aren't millionaires.

Mark Mayo
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3 Answers3

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Virgin Galactic is now saying it will be in 2013 ( http://m.engadget.com/2012/07/15/richard-branson-confirms-virgin-galactics-first-space-tourism-f/ and http://www.virgingalactic.com/news/item/xxx/ ) and $200,000 per person. I have no affiliation; a friend of mine is on the waiting list. As http://www.virgingalactic.com/booking/ explains, your choices are to pay the entire refundable amount up front and be sure of a seat on the first flight (thus becoming one of the first thousand people in space, since about 500 people have been on NASA or Soviet missions and a little over 500 are on this list), or pay $20,000 and join the waiting list.

Kate Gregory
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Space tourism has been taking place since 2001

The first real space tourist1 was Dennis Tito, spending a week on the ISS in mid-2001. The trip cost him about $20 million US and was organized by Space Adventures, who organized a total of 8 trips for 7 tourists (Charles Simonyi went twice) to the ISS between 2001 and 2009. All trips were made aboard Soyuz-TMA spacecraft. The most recent trips cost around $30-$35 million US. The program is currently on hold, but set to resume next year:

On January 12, 2011, Space Adventures and the Russian Federal Space Agency announced that orbital space tourism would resume in 2013 with the increase of manned Soyuz launches to the ISS from four to five per year.

1 The term "space tourist" is disputable.

Ingmar
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11 years after this question was asked, and 10 years after the accepted answer's optimistic announcement that Virgin Galactic will start regular flights in 2013, it's happening! Kinda:

Virgin's flight Galactic 02 took place in August 2023, with paying civilian passengers on board for the first time. And they're promising roughly-monthly flights going forward, with Galactic 03 scheduled for September.

A couple of caveats:

  • The flights max out at 88.5 km, which is space by some definitions but below the 100 km Karman line, and far too low/slow to (eg) ever dock with the ISS.
  • Tickets cost a cool $450,000 as of 2022, so less than a million, but not exactly chump change.
  • You only get about 4 minutes of weightlessness at the top of parabola.
  • The multi-part vehicle design they're using is generally reckoned to be an evolutionary dead end and quite dangerous, they already had a fatal crash in 2014.

So I'm still waiting for Elon to get Starship off the ground until I start booking my tickets to space.

lambshaanxy
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